Rules Don't Apply

A One-time Window Designer Tosses Out `You Can't' Thinking And Finds High Impact With Flea-market `junk'

April 09, 1995|By Victoria Lautman.

Gumption, chutzpah and extreme confidence: That's what it takes to gild a flea-market table and resurface it with peacock feathers. Creating a conversation area with an inlaid Syrian chair, an overstuffed late-Deco sofa and a frou-frou white torchier worthy of Marquise de Pompadour's boudoir requires sheer moxie.

But for artist/designer Neraldo de la Paz, the mix is the message, and no texture, color or contrast is too shrill.

"I just don't think there are any rules to designing a successful interior," says the visionary de la Paz, who divides his time between Chicago and Miami. "People proclaim all sorts of things like, 'You can't put orange with red' or 'You can't use this style with that one'--but it's all intrinsically individual and nothing should be considered off limits."

Nowhere is the "no rules" spirit more apparent than in de la Paz's own home, a loft near Wicker Park. Packed with contemporary art, collections of religious santos and enough painted Venetian furniture to fill a room in the doge's palace, the home reflects creative principles retained from de la Paz's years as an art student and, later, a window designer for Stanley Korshak, Fiorucci and Vittorio Ricci.

"My retail experience had a lot to do with building my confidence in combining things," he points out. "The stores had limited budgets for window dressing and were often low on merchandise, but I had to be able to make a big impact each week with very limited resources. I scavenged clothes from every department and fixtures from wherever I found them, including basements, hardware stores, flea markets and garbage cans. It was a large-scale assemblage approach, like making sculpture, and it's a technique I still use in my own artwork."

In fact, de la Paz's home (and those of his clients) is an extension of this collaging of objects.

Antiques mingle with flea-market "junk," haute art abuts pop culture. But just as each juxtaposition offers a visual jolt, each individual object reveals that the silhouette outweighs such changeable elements as finish or color.

The man who routinely "Neraldoizes" his quirky finds with layers of paint, gold leaf and inventive upholstery says, "Once you study the lines of historic furnishings, it's easy to transform something from this century into something that evokes another era. For instance, I love the look of Czarist Russian furniture, or the arabesque works by Bugatti--but what I can't afford I simulate, and there's always the illusion that an object has been around longer than it really has."

De la Paz's style, eccentric to some, seems suddenly much closer to The New Look, now that blending styles and periods is considered de rigueur.

"This is what seems to happen at the turn of every century. All the experiences and tastes of the earlier hundred years culminate in one big bang, regurgitated and recombined all together. It's like we're preparing for something new and have to get rid of the old, so there are no restrictions. Anything goes, and it's liberating."